As I see it

As of two days ago, we seem finally to have lost summer, which is a jolt, but we can't complain.  We've had a good run.  It's just over six months since the start of lockdown, and that six months has been pretty much good weather all the way through, bar the inevitable occasional wet spell.  Obviously at the start good weather meant warm weather rather than hot weather, but that's what we had.  The start of the period was notable for queues outside the supermarket, and I remember reflecting that it was lucky that lockdown was starting when it was, ie when it was no hardship to queue outside the supermarket for half an hour or so in the sunshine, and that it in the winter it would be a very different matter.  Even two minutes would be too long if one were queuing in cold rain.  That could happen yet, which is depressing.

So it's been a depressing week all round.  We got up to 25 degrees on Tuesday, but since then we have had three cold, wet mornings.  Today (Friday) it is windy too, with a top temperature of 12.  At least the rain blew over after first lot.  And that's coincided with the (inevitable) resurgence of COVID-19, leading the predictions of potentially another lockdown, with the new restrictions put in place this week pencilled in to last for six months (or more).  The main blow from racing's point of view, of course, is that plans to reintroduce spectators at the racecourses have been shelved, seemingly for a long time.

I'd been hoping earlier in the summer that the attention paid to the problems faced by racing, and in particular its finances, would have focussed minds on the extent to which British racing is fighting with one hand behind its back compared to pretty much everyone else.  But I'm beginning to fear that that might not be the case.  For too long the press has been resistant to the idea that British racing doesn't get much of a return from the betting which it generates, and I'd been hopeful that people might now be viewing things from a different perspective as we faced the prospect of the raw deal received by owners potentially having a meaningful negative impact on the sport's health.  Maybe not, but we'll see.

Basically, the other major racing nations put Britain to shame as regards the return from betting.  In Britain, the return is approximately 0.6% of turnover.  In Ireland it's approximately 1.5% (in the form of a grant from the government, passing on part of what it receives).  In Australia it's 3.9%.  In Hong Kong it's 4.4%.  In France it's 8.6%.  In the USA it's 14.5%.  In Japan it's 16%.  Previously, any calls for Britain's share to be increased have been decried by too many members of the media who ought to know better, echoing the standard line about 'expecting punters to subsidise the hobbies of rich people'.

I was hoping that in the current climate, when there is a genuine likelihood of a significant contraction of the country's ownership base, the people who have generally trotted out that line might start instead to see it not along those lines, but along the lines of not asking owners (who are always going to bare the brunt of the subsidising, however things work out) to bear such an overwhelming percentage of the burden of paying for the sport which we all enjoy, but asking it to be spread out slightly less one-sidedly among the people who get pleasure from it.

The problem, of course, came when the decision was taken maybe 20 years ago to change the Levy basis from a percentage of turnover (as it generally the case elsewhere and had been the case here) to a percentage of bookmakers' gross profits.  At the time, this wasn't a major issue.  Bookmakers had to bet to a certain percentage to make enough profit cover their massive overheads (and racing's share was a percentage of the gross profit, not the net profit which obviously is the gross profit minus the bookmaker's expenses).  Unfortunately, the situation was overtaken by events almost straightaway, courtesy of the invention of betting exchanges.

Until this point, all bookmakers had significant overheads.  On-course bookmakers obviously have huge overheads, but betting shop operators have even greater.  Renting or owning the shops; paying business rates and insurance; paying staff.  The landscape was changed utterly by Betfair as the licensed bookmakers had the rug pulled out from under their feet by the arrival of unlicensed bookmakers who have no expenses.  As long as they had a computer and had the racing channels on the their TVs at home, they could make a book through Betfair - and, having no expenses, they could bet to a tiny percentage, undercutting the licensed bookmakers, who had either to adapt (ie lower their margins and find some way of still making it pay) or go out of business.

This meant that the percentage of the bookmakers' gross profits became a much smaller percentage of turnover than had been the intention at the outset.  And that's why we're in trouble.  Germany and Italy have almost disappeared off the racing radar since they have lost their Tote monopolies and had them replaced by the situation outlined above, and we can only hope that we don't go the same way.  Or, rather, we shouldn't necessarily need only to hope because it doesn't have to be like this - but, while the preferred option remains asking owners to pay an overwhelming share of the expenses of putting on the sport, rather than merely the large majority, hope is all that we shall have.

One thing which could be done to try to address the sport's immediate funding issue would be to allow racecourses to welcome a limited number of spectators.  It is madness that this doesn't happen and that plans to allow this to resume happening have been scrapped.  When we went to Salisbury the other week, we drove past the Imperial War Museum's Duxford branch.  The car park was at least three quarters full.  The hangers must have been teeming with paying customers.  Cinemas are open.  Pubs.  (And I'm not even mentioning things like supermarkets, because they are in a different category as food-shops have to remain open for people to buy food).  Where would you feel safer, in one of those or in the large open spaces of racecourses' enclosures?

Warwick's trial seemed to go very well on Monday.  Ditto the one day of the St Leger meeting when the plans to allow spectators weren't scrapped.  Warwick cracked me up.  Spectators had been allowed in on the first day of its two-day meeting, but not on the second.  Even so, when I watched the second day's action on TV there were groups of people lining the rails up the straight watching the horses galloping by.  How so?  Well, there's a caravan park inside the racecourse and there was a collection of camper vans in there, whose occupants were free to watch the racing in an uncontrolled environment.  But could we have a similar number of people in a controlled environment on the other side of the track?  No way!  You couldn't make it up.  It's the same as at Wetherby and Kempton: you can go there for a car-boot sale and jostle your way through the crowds there, but not to the races.  Madness.

That's enough of that.  We have two runners coming up so we can focus on them, rather than on the insanity around us.  Kryptos runs in the Cambridgeshire tomorrow with Josephine Gordon in the saddle.  He'll have a chance, but then so will twenty-something others, so we won't get too carried away with our hopes and expectations.  And then I hope that Das Kapital will run over hurdles next week with William Kennedy (seen on him this morning in the chapter's final two photographs).  Bangor on Wednesday would be my first choice, but we might not get in there so Fontwell on Friday might have to do instead.